WORSE THAN WAR--Wednesday, April 14, 2010 9:00-11:00 p.m. on WMHT

WORSE THAN WAR
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
9:00-11:00 p.m. on WMHT
- Groundbreaking Documentary on Worldwide Phenomenon of Genocide
Airs During National Holocaust Remembrance Week -
Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been more than
100 million innocent victims of genocide worldwide - more than the
number of combat deaths in all the wars fought in every corner of
the globe during the same period.
With his first book, the international best-seller Hitler's Willing
Executioners (Vintage, 1997), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - then a
professor of political science at Harvard University - forced the
world to re-think some of its most deeply held beliefs about the
Holocaust. Hitler's Willing Executioners inspired an unprecedented
worldwide discussion and debate about the role ordinary Germans
played in the annihilation of Europe's Jews.
A decade later - and more than half a century after the end of World
War II - Goldhagen is convinced that the overall phenomenon of
genocide is as poorly understood as the Holocaust had once been. How
and why do genocides start? Why do the perpetrators kill? Why has
intervention rarely occurred in a timely manner? WORSE THAN WAR,
airing Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS during
National Holocaust Remembrance Week, explores these and other
thought-provoking questions.
Based on Goldhagen's book of the same title, which has been called
"magisterial" by The New York Times, "convincing" and "wholly
original" by Kirkus, "pathbreaking" by Die Presse and "masterful" by
the Daily Telegraph, WORSE THAN WAR is the first documentary to step
back and focus on the general phenomenon of genocide - offering
viewers profound insights into its dimensions, patterns and causes
and tragic role in politics and human affairs.
"By the most fundamental measure - the number of people killed - the
perpetrators of mass murder since the beginning of the 20th century
have taken the lives of more people than have died in military
conflict. So genocide is worse than war," iterates Goldhagen. "This
is a little-known fact that should be a central focus of
international politics, because once you know it, the world,
international politics and what we need to do all begin to look
substantially different from how they are typically conceived."
WORSE THAN WAR documents Goldhagen's travels, teachings and
interviews in nine countries around the world, bringing viewers on
an unprecedented journey of insight and analysis. In a film that is
highly cinematic and evocative throughout, he speaks with victims,
perpetrators, witnesses, politicians, diplomats, historians,
humanitarian aid workers and journalists, all with the purpose of
explaining and understanding the critical features of genocide and
how to stop it.
In Rwanda, perpetrators of genocide speak candidly about their
participation in mass murders, and Minister of Justice Tharcisse
Karugarama discusses the perpetrators' willingness, the world's
failure and how we can prevent the same fate in other countries. In
Guatemala, Goldhagen explores the concept of "overkill" with the
country's leading forensic pathologist; in an extraordinary
interview, he confronts former president José Efraín Ríos Montt,
the person in power during the genocide of Maya in the early 1980s.
In Bosnia, he attends the annual commemoration of the massacre at Sr
ebrenica, the worst mass-killing in Europe since World War II, and h
as a candid discussion with the nation's president Haris Silajdžić a
bout his efforts to convince U.S. and world leaders to intervene whe
n it became apparent that "ethnic cleansing" was underway. In Ukrain
e, Goldhagen returns with his father Erich (also a scholar of the Ho
locaust) to the town where Erich was nearly killed during the Holoca
ust.
Goldhagen also conducts probing and revealing interviews with
Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State; Francis Deng, UN
Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide; and Clint
Williamson, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.